2013B Images of Meditation by Liz Watson

what is there, in the core of us, this desire for God; and we cannot be happy until we have satisfied that desire, until we have quenched that thirst. If we do not quench that thirst, we are always going to be in need. So, to be an acorn is to have a taste for being an oak tree.

Let us imagine you saw an acorn lying on the ground and you had never seen one before; you did not know what it was. By simply looking at it, it would be impossible to imagine what it could become.

It would be absolutely impossible to know that it had a potential for being a mighty oak tree. And so what Thomas Merton was saying in that image was that we have a potential hidden in each one of us to be something which is unimaginable. We cannot possibly imagine what we could be. We can glimpse, in general terms, what it looks like for a human being to develop that divine potential, and the place we can look in particular to see what that might look like is Jesus and also other holy people who speak to us of God, who look like God, who look Christ-like to us, but we cannot imagine exactly what it would like for us to have that potential unfolded.

But when we make the decision to sit down and meditate, somewhere inside us that desire to be more, to find the more that we could be, has already stirred, even though we are not yet very conscious of it.

So we begin the journey of meditation and we begin it in a way that we begin anything else that we try and do. We set a goal and want to achieve it, or we have some problems and we want to try and fix them. But it isn’t long before we realise that it does not work like that. Just as an acorn cannot soften its own case, it cannot break through on its own (it needs the sun and the rain and the nutrients and the soil to do that, and then it can begin to break through into its new state, it can begin to grow), so it is for us. We cannot do it on our own, but we can provide the conditions that will help it to happen.

So what are the conditions that we need when we are going to sit to meditate?

The first thing is to try and find a quiet place; it does not make sense to put extra distractions in our way deliberately. We try and find a quiet place. We try and find a place we can go to regularly, a 22